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Onholdwith.com is a community-driven platform that aims to end hold time for customers. The website tracks companies who are experiencing the most complaints on Twitter from people waiting on hold. It’s our way of recognizing which businesses need to improve their call center hold times, and could benefit from a call-back solution like Fonolo’s. But the most interesting part of onholdwith.com are the tweets themselves.

By the time someone has taken to social media to unleash their innermost hold-time frustrations, the result can be truly eye-opening, and sometimes pretty darn hilarious. I mean, if you’re waiting on hold for 4 hours, you have to find humor in hearing, “Your call is important to us, please hold,” for the 89th time, right?

We’ve looked at the top 10 hold time offenders this month, and scoured their Twitter complaints to compile some of the most cringe-worthy responses to waiting on hold.

Fonolo is excited to return as a sponsor for this year’s Contact Center Demo & Conference, happening September 25-27th at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Contact Center Demo & Conference is produced by ICMI – a trusted advisor in the contact center industry – and is an independent, forward-thinking program focused on future contact center trends.

Attendees will have the opportunity to solve new challenges facing the call center space, chat with industry recognized thought leaders, and speak to vendors about the latest solutions.

At this year’s event, Fonolo will be showcasing its brand new feature-rich customer portal, equipped with scheduled call-backs, improved call-back metrics, and a more simplified way for international contact centers to deploy call-backs. Continue reading →

In case you’ve been living on an island in Tahiti, with no communication to the outside world, you may not know how important mobile apps have become. In that case, let’s recap. Mobile apps are software applications designed to run on smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. They dominate the time spent on mobile devices by 74% compared to mobile time spent on the web. Additionally, 75% of US adults will use a smartphone in 2017, while Millennials become more willing to make purchases within apps, (nearly 50% of them are making five or more in-app purchases annually). Today, most consumers are multi-channel users, meaning they channel hop from desktop, mobile, and phone, throughout a transaction; this makes mobile support increasingly important.

A mobile application is essential for a multitude of reasons, namely to support customer service and enhance the experience. Importantly, mobile apps can put out fires that could otherwise cost you big time. Here are 4 ways your mobile app helps to prevent customer service disasters:

Call centers get a bad rap for being stress inducing, soul sucking, and just plain dreadful places to work. That may be true for some, but if you’re a savvy call center leader, making the most of your work, and walking away from each day unscathed, is completely possible. Not all of us know the secret to keeping a positive and productive outlook at work, but thankfully we have the Internet for that. Reddit, the popular site best known for viral memes and gifs, has a number of threads dedicated to the contact center. In these ingenious forums, veteran call center employees share tricks of the trade, words of wisdom, and general hacks that have helped them to enjoy working in this environment.

We’ve compiled 25 of the best contact center hacks from these Reddit threads, to help you become more successful in this field of work (and avoid sitting in a straitjacket): Continue reading →

Customer experience is fast becoming the leading reason why customers choose your brand. Convenience, simplicity, and putting the customer first has a tremendous impact on whether or not you maintain a loyal following, or lose out to the competition. In this age of technology, where the experience is constantly changing and being updated, it’s important for CX leaders to stay in the know, and discuss what’s happening in this space. LinkedIn Groups give top business professionals the ability to follow the trends and conversations going on in their industry, while also sharing relevant content with peers.

There are a lot of groups to choose from on LinkedIn, and if you’re a customer experience professional you probably don’t have a lot of time to weed through all your recommended groups. Instead, we’ve gathered a list of the top 10 LinkedIn Groups based on relevancy, popularity, and quality of content shared. We hope this makes group finding a bit easier!

As with any relationship, there are always ups and downs; good days and bad days. Sometimes you do things that can be forgiven (we all make mistakes right?), and some people are more forgiving than others. But we all have a breaking point, and sometimes, like with human relationships, businesses can also take loyal customers for granted, making mistakes so bad that they lose them forever. In fact, these incidents usually come as a surprise since 80% of defecting customers describe themselves as “satisfied” or “very satisfied” just before they leave! (We’ve all been there, pretending to be happy when we’re afraid to tell someone when they are treating us poorly.)

It’s important then for companies to be proactive about not making the mistakes that put customers over the edge, or they may never ever see them again, like ever.

Don’t get blindsided by customer break-ups; know the 5 most popular reasons why customers stop doing business with you for good:

Customer satisfaction, otherwise known as CSat (when referring to the contact center), indicates overall customer happiness. If your business is experiencing low customer satisfaction scores you might be left scratching your head and asking “Why?” In fact, a recent report by Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business revealed that a wide cross-section of industries often overestimate their customers’ satisfaction. This leads them to rely on unrealistic expectations when making marketing decisions and allocating resources to address marketplace issues.

In this handy playbook, contact center leaders will learn the ins and outs of improving customer satisfaction, otherwise known as CSat. This guide will discuss important metrics to consider when measuring satisfaction, and how to achieve customer happiness and retention along the way.

How Do CSat, NPS and CES Work Together?

While both CSAT and NPS are measurements of customer sentiment, they have very different functions. NPS has a standardized process and measurement trademarked, while CSat is a more general concept. The second divergence is in what the two metrics measure. NPS is typically said to be a measurement of customer loyalty to a brand. By contrast, CSat scores are strictly a measurement of customer happiness. Continue reading →

Last week, Fonolo hosted a very insightful and engaging Google Hangout discussing the future of chat-for-commerce and if Apple is a legitimate threat. This expert panel discussed how messaging platforms are shaping the way we interact, and how businesses and consumers can embrace this new wave of communications. To save you some time, we’ve extracted video snippets showcasing highlights from the discussion.

Every third Thursday, at the beginning of every quarter, is known as #GetToKnowYourCustomersDay. In the name of trying to improve the customer experience, Fonolo takes this time to target specific industries and ask their customers how they feel about doing business with them. Last quarter – during tax season – we asked millennials to tell us about their experiences with the banking industry (Needless to say there is a shared opinion that financial communications and processes need to be modernized).

Now that we’re in the middle of vacation season, it only makes sense that we take this opportunity to focus on the airline industry. Whether you love it or hate it, travelling is all part of the vacation experience, and if your trip involves flying, you’re most likely going to face the woes of airports and airline hospitality (or lack thereof). Additionally, airlines are frequently present on our hold time offenders list, and we think it’s about time we start a conversation about how airlines can make travelling a more pleasant experience for passengers.